


record player song

by londondungeon2



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Gen, Hair Dyeing, Play Fighting, Self Confidence Issues, Sibling Bonding, Surgery, narcissim, probably the weakest thing i've written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24181117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londondungeon2/pseuds/londondungeon2
Summary: But ten candles are just around the corner, Carmela plots to be a woman. A woman can dye her own hair.
Relationships: None
Kudos: 6





	record player song

**Author's Note:**

> Something I did for my HCW class. 
> 
> I wanted this fucking thing out of my draft - I don't like it at all but I know there is a lack of fanfic that is just platonic of the siblings. I don't think it because it's very lackluster but I guess it's fine.

Without mirrors, Carmela would die - she is sure, X-ing her arms and stamping down her foot as she begs her father to buy her another one. Lakes of reflective glass she needs to fix a wrinkle in dress, straighten a lock of chameleon hair, or apply products on her face like pigments for a Van Gogh piece. Without mirrors, Carmela would feel alien to herself. 

Sitting ahead of Largo's bathroom mirror, Carmela never allows her eyes to leave her reflection for more than ten seconds. Blue eyes inspect the instructions in hand. She pouts over not hiring/pestering a GENtern to do this procedure for her. But ten candles are just around the corner, she plots to be a woman. Looking back up at her twin, she depresses a gloved hand to her brow, staring at the disheveled mess of hay on her skull pulled into four sections. A woman can dye her own hair.

Picking up the stirred developer and cobalt dye, she depresses latex fingers and starts to brush it through her hair. Concentrated eyes glower at her reflection. With surgery, she would be able to get this done so much easier. A simple scalpel and stitches could get her blue hair within less than an hour. However, her father bans surgery for her until her bat mitzvah to her disappointment.

Girls in her class already have surgery. A girl in her science class has silicone C-sized breasts that hook in attention - nine years old like little Carmela Largo. It is an unfair violation of her civil rights, the ravenette argues; she is the daughter of GeneCo - the company built to hand out surgeries like candy - and she has to wait. She has thrown enough tantrums for her footsteps to equal an earthquake yet no dice. 

All teachers and people on TV preach that it is what on the insides that matters. Yet, she knows they do not mean morals or emotions - only the old old movies her Daddy has outlawed spread that message. She knows they mean her organs.

In science class, they dissect a frog. The pale-green tints of the organs still stain her mind as she finishes the second section of her. Ebon black fades to straw yellow to a hopeful ocean cobalt. It looks like frog organs though. In the mirror, she starts to think that she mixes it all wrong - blue greener than expected. She hums and grabs at the third sector of her hair and says it will wash to an opulent hue of blue. Her crooning stops when the bathroom door opens.

“Oh great, _you’re_ here.”

“Yeah, I live here, Cam,” Luigi counters, stepping in. 

She bristles, he knows she hates that nickname. As usual, Luigi always manages to make comments that crawl under the skin like poisonous insects - he knows the buttons to push. “I told you not to call me that! Besides, I’m going by Heather now,” Carmela growls. 

“And the next minute, you’re going by Tenna.” She is not too surprised when Luigi kicks at her seat legs, knowing she is on the wobbly stool with a loose bone. “Whatever, _Cam._ ” 

Luigi has been cruel for the entire length of her memory. With each passing year, anger mushrooms in him like a grotesque sore. He yells more and more. His rage is volatile, swinging between extremes, in the spoiled way that Carmela does when wanting surgery, but deadlier. 

When she is six, Carmela has a white bunny with brown speckles, crowns her Peaches with a pink collar. One forgetful day, the cage door is left slightly unlocked and Peaches makes a brisk escapade. The bunny makes too many wrong turns and ends up in Luigi’s room. Later on the forgetful day, Peaches is found strung up by her organs like tinsel by pink-faced, screaming Carmela. It is the last time any Largo siblings have a pet. 

Carmela kicks him back from her frail stool. He blinks at the assault of his knee, stands as if pondering. Then, he thrusts all his weight at her suddenly - stopping short. She flinches. “Two for flinching,” Luigi laughs as he punches her arm and almost surely leaves twin violetish-yellow flowers stamped on her flesh. 

“You are such a dick, Luigi,” She growls. With a sour expression, she rubs at the imminent bruises only to smear dye over her shoulder. A tiny shriek sounds soon after. Grabbing a towel and scrubbing, she asks her old brother a question. “Why are you even here?”

Luigi opens his mouth to answer. Pavi walks in, interrupting. All siblings surmise that the two are biological brothers - identical raven hair (Luigi's sheared short and Pavi's dangling to his pierced ears), big Roman noses, and teeth like a cemetery. Their father never bothers to answer if this is true. However, all siblings share one thing though, all their mommies are buried - or at least, hopefully. - and they have to share a bathroom.

“Oh, hello-a, brother and sister.” Pavi smiles, surprised from the abundance of people in the bathroom. They drown in riches yet are sandwiched in a single bathroom. “I’ll be quick-a, do not worry.” He assures in a fake Italian accent to mask a stutter.

Pavi - with a vicious push - half sends his little sister off the stool to get a better view of himself in the mirror. He uncaps the lipstick in an aphrodisiac confidence that Carmela envies. Pouting modified lips, he guides the ebon rouge over his mouth. Done, he turns and sultry smiles with pearly white teeth. “How do-a I look? I’m going-a to get a new surgery-a, sorella. I must look-a good for my GENterns and bambole.”

 _“Oh, I want surgery!_ What are you getting,” Carmela laments. In her puffy mint dress, her legs swing merrily from the mention. Whenever surgery is introduced to a discussion, a flare brightens her eyes - the same as most girls get when talking about ponies or boys. 

“Come on, Carmela, you don’t want to get surgeries like this fag. Your face will look like a toilet accident,” Luigi interjects.

“Just-a because you’re fine with-a looking like roadkiller, fatello, does not mean Carmela and I don’t have class. Besides, if ugly were-a contagious, I would-a caught it a long time ago from _you_.” A smirk grows in the cosmetics covering Pavi’s face.

“Better than being a gay Barbie-wannabe.”

“You kill-a all of your girlfriends! How do we know you aren’t gay?”

“Because I’m not throwing makeup on me like I’m Barbra Streisand trying to cover her fucking huge nose.”

Pavi bristles, especially since Luigi knows he is easily upset over his nose. A year back, the day before his bar mitzvah, Pavi goes through four different noses like one would switch their outfits. Each time a GENtern hands him a mirror, an irate rumble billows from his throat. “Do it again. Less pointy; slimmer too.” He thrusts it back and does not wait for the response, snapping back on the mask of anesthesia. On the special day, he pertly moves his head in each direction with each relative until he receives a compliment.

His face melts to a fiery red, the whites of his eyes shining against the hue. Even though he is smaller than the seventeen year old and skinner, Pavi throws himself at his brother. “We-a share genetics, you-a idiot! You have-a the same nose as me!” He roars, hands seizing Luigi’s violet ascot. 

“You look like!” Luigi stops. Shoulders puffing, he depresses knuckles to mouth as Pavi hesitantly releases the ascot. Little coughs bubble out from him and his siblings stare on. Air becomes blocked by a plastic bag. His nostrils flare and flare yet seem to drag in no currents of oxygen. Before his brain can go from insults to panic, his wheezes start.

Luigi feels someone marauding, clothes ruffling suddenly and fingers prodding pants. He hates all of it - the ocean in his lungs and the pressure on his thighs - and wants so badly to scream through the wheezes, get away get away get away. Body churning like a bad engine, he feels someone place something in his hand. Half of his sense comes through and he sticks the inhaler between chattering teeth. 

His breathing normals out, the ocean tide pulls away, and the fingers leave him. He glares up, pocketing the tiny device. Though they have put up with him for almost ten years (to Carmela at least), the worry in their eyes never dilutes when Luigi has an asthma attack.

Luigi Largo is born in 2019, a year before a global pandemic of organ failures devastates countries. He is the reason for GeneCo, him and his lungs. Born with violet tints in his cheek and breathless, he had fallen quickly to the virus and his asthma consumed him like a centipede. He learns his first words with doctors as his father and mother toil with their options. GeneCo is built in Luigi’s honor as hope to save Rotti Largo’s first son. And it works - almost. In the end, they incinerate the beds, viruses having sunk into the memory foam, and Luigi comes home to his parents with an inhaler and a thousand instructions.

“You okay?”

“Shut your mouth, Cam.” 

Carmela does not bother to mention that she is going by Vera now. She smiles, fond. A middle finger is his response. She uprights all the beauty products Luigi had spent spiraling on the ceramic counter, betting he barely notices. Her timer sings, little snowflakes of music startling her. “Help me wash out my dye?”

For a second, Luigi thinks she is talking to Pavi (they always indulge in this process together). He breaks his minatory lean on the counter - crossed arms and brooming like any teen. “You’re asking _me?”_ Visible surprise moves his face when Carmela nods. “Um, sure.”

Reluctant, he rolls up the sleeves of his white button-up. He watches as Carmela ducks down into the sink’s jaw and maneuvers the stringy pieces of greenish-blue hair away from her neck. She offers him the plastic gloves, he brushes them aside. With a flick of his wrist, water spews. Swallowing pique, he rakes his bitten nails through tacky ringlets. The texture reminds him of wet, iron-smelling carnage and the thought of blood settles him. Relaxed, he continues less stone and more gentle. Luigi even apologizes when Carmela ‘ow’s at a knot being teared.

As Luigi is watching mint water spiral down the drain, he hears Pavi toy with his wrist communicator. The wrist communicator is a metal watch, located on the evident limb, and functions like an ancient IPhone yet programmed with holograms. Luigi judges he is texting one of his GENterns with amorphous comments until drums join the chorus of rushing water.

Wide eyes blink down at the petite bluish-green band on Pavi’s arm. He knows the lyrics before they even drop from the tiny musician’s mouth and he clenches his teeth. However, Pavi - freeing from his ridiculous accent - sings along. “Going to rewind, what’s inside of me that’s _hard_ to see? In the morning, I’ll be _fine_.” Carmela sings along, stopping in moments to spit out green water, in her forcing soprano voice. Luigi lets his teeth unclench. He should allow them to enjoy this. 

The song ends when Camela’s hair is washed. 

Carmela, humming, wipes stringy hair over her shoulders. Jostling the towel up and down, she dries at the water with squeezes and tugs. One hand dries and the other starts to brush at knots. Even at nine she is excellent at double-tasking - only under the conditions that it involves makeup. After a while, she turns, hair straightened and slit at her bony shoulders. “How do I look?”

“You look like you’re wearing a crown of seaweed, Carmela.”

“It’s pronounced Amber”

“Whatever.” Luigi’s gray eyes move around in a roulette wheel, a sigh escaping him. Before he can say another word, a latex glove pats him hard on the face. As supposed-to-be-blue dye drips down the side of his profile, his younger siblings burst out into laughs of mirth. “Oh, you’re _dead.”_

Without care, he drips his entire hand through the tupperware of pigment and wipes it in a slant down Carmela’s face. She gasps, spittles of green landing on her dress. Behind the glutinous mask, her eyes gleam with shock and registering anger. With a scream, Carmela flings her hands at the taller sibling. 

They wrestle for a while until jointly coming to the realization of who is watching and recording them with a laugh. Pavi, wrist communicator raised, stops laughing when their eyes lock. “Wait wait,” he backs up from the green hands “, fratello, sorella, _not the face!”_

❁

Twenty minutes later, they are found by their father - faces submerged in ‘blissful blue’ that turned to a grassy vomit hue and giggling loudly. He scolds each of them, voicing stark disappointment. Luigi ducks his head down, spine curling in like a match burning with chagrin. After each one has stirred the blame to the other in three cycles (“Father-a, I was-a only trying to find my mascara!”/“It’s all Carmela’s fault!”/“I told you it’s Amber now! And no, it wasn’t; it was Luigi’s fault!”/“Nuh-uh.”/ _“Yuh-uh!”_ ), the head of GeneCo tells the oldest two to leave. 

“Carmela, what am I going to do with you?” Head eschew, she murmurs that she herself does not even know. He sighs and kneels down in front her - so much skinnier than his future self. “What were you even doing in here?”

“...Surgery.”

“Carmela, I told you, you have to wait until you are twelve.” A pang of guilt sticks his heart, watching his daughter’s shoulder slump like a deflating pastry weighed down by water. He puts his enormous hand on her knobby joint, squeezing lightly. “You don’t need it.”

“Daddy, do you think of me as beautiful?” This is a question she always asks her father, each and every time their paths overlap - it is not often either. She needs repeating affirmation as she needs mirrors. The mirrors always tell she is but she needs to hear it from someone else’s mouth too.

Rotti looks down at the girl who will be an addict of the scalpels and knives in just two petite years, who is going to imbue morphine-like Zydrate into her veins. He smiles. “Yes, Carmela, you are _very_ beautiful.”


End file.
